Since the 1980s, multimedia and new technologies have had a great impact on theatre, allowing performance to establish its own language of communication with the audience independent of the written text. Robert Lepage is one of the pioneers and main exponents of mixed-media performance, internationally renowned for a notoriously distinct aesthetic. Aleksandar Dundjerovic, in the first book to explore Lepage's practical work, offers a comprehensive analysis of his creative process, his "transformative mise-en-scene."

A groundbreaking collection of original essays, Stages of Reality establishes a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between stage and screen media. This comprehensive volume explores the significance of theatricality within critical discourse about cinema and television. Stages of Reality connects the theory and practice of cinematic theatricality through conceptual analyses and close readings of films including The Matrix and There Will be Blood. Contributors illuminate how this mode of address disrupts expectations surrounding cinematic form and content, evaluating strategies such as ostentatious performances, formal stagings, fragmentary montages, and methods of dialogue delivery and movement. Detailing connections between cinematic artifice and topics such as politics, gender, and genre, Stages of Reality allows readers to develop a clear sense of the multiple purposes and uses of theatricality in film.

The Theatrical Event discusses the objectives of theatre studies by focusing on the communicative encounter between performer and spectator—the theatrical event. A theatrical event includes the presentation of a performance and the attention of an audience; in this sense, every performance—on stage or in the street, historical or contemporary—that is watched by an audience is a theatrical event. The concept underlines the “eventness” of all encounters between performers and spectators. In the first part of the book, Willmar Sauter presents various models for the analysis of theatrical events, examining the relationship between performance and perception and the interaction between the performative event and its context. Using examples from ancient and recent theatre history and discussing traditional and nontraditional approaches to theatre theory, he builds a paradigmatic change in the concept of theatre. Constructs such as playing culture (as opposed to written culture), theatrical communication, theatricality, and theatre as a model of cultural event are brought into focus and their methodological advantages explored. The second part of the book uses the theoretical groundwork of the first part to enhance a variety of topics, including such legends as Sarah Bernhardt and other historical phenomena such as a Swedish Renaissance play, Strindberg's ideas on acting, the question of ethnicity in the political theatre of the 1930s, and critical writings on contemporary performances. Sauter examines how Robert Lepage's staging of A Dream Play is viewed by critics and scholars and analyzes Dario Fo's intercultural transfer to outdoor performances in Stockholm and the unusual sensationalism of Strindberg's Miss Julie.

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space provides an ideal introduction to one of our most innovative companies – and a much-needed and timely reappraisal of Lepage's oeuvre. International, interdisciplinary and intercultural to the core, Ex Machina have negotiated some of the most complex creative and cultural challenges of our time. This book maps the story of that journey by analysing the full spectrum of their richly varied work. Through a comprehensive historiography of productions since 1994, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina offers a detailed picture of the relationship between director and company, while connecting Ex Machina to culturally specific features of Québec, and its theatre. This book reveals for the first time how overlooked aspects of creativity and culture shaped the company's early work, while installing a dynamic interplay between director and company that would spark a unique and ongoing evolution of praxis. Central to this re-evaluation of practice is the book's identification of an architectural aesthetic at the heart of Ex Machina's work, an aesthetic which provides its artistic and political centres of gravity. Moreover, this architectural aesthetic powers the emergence of concrete narrative as a new and distinctive mode of theatrical storytelling – uniting story and space, body and technology, content and form – and demanding that we discover the politics of these performances in the energetic gestures of theatre design, and space itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lepage, Ex Machina personnel and collaborative partners, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina calls upon us to revise both our creative and critical perceptions of this vital and distinctive practice.

"Robert Lepage has imposed himself in the past three decades as a Wunderkind of contemporary theatre, with eagerly awaited and widely acclaimed productions at the most prestigious theatre festivals and venues around the world. Soon after his international breakthrough with The Dragon's Trilogy (1984), Lepage's work became an object of particular scrutiny for critics and scholars, and continues to be subject to media exposure, inspiring cultural critique, academic study and the admiration of audiences across the world. A recurrent fascination with the formal novelty of his theatrical approach imbues most, if not all, critical considerations. However, in spite of the wide interest provoked, little space has been devoted to the quintessential impact of his work on spectatorship, and, most importantly, to connecting the dots between his creative practice and its substantial impact on audiences. Intermediality and Spectatorship in the Theatre Work of Robert Lepage bridges this gap by exploring the notion that intermediality - observed both as a mise-en-scene strategy and a perceptual effect in performance - is situated at the core of the director's approach. This approach is situated in direct relation to the evolving expectations and medial competencies of spectators, demonstrating an in-depth understanding of the ways in which different media can be engaged in the creative process in a holistic way in order to alter the regime of spectatorship, to enhance its creative and cognitive potential.Lepage's work and theatre making process are analysed here from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines theatre, media and cultural studies, and which is applied to his solo shows, namely Vinci (1986), Needles and Opium (1991), Elsinore (1995), Far Side of the Moon (2000) and Project Andersen (2005). In bringing to the forefront interconnecting notions of intermediality and contemporary spectatorship, the book highlights the director's preoccupation with an ongoing dialogue with audiences across the world, and their particular involvement in the development of one of the most innovative practices of the Western theatre landscape."

Investigates the influence of technology and visual art in the work of Robert Lepage, leading figure on the international stage.

Reading the Material Theatre develops and demonstrates a method of theatrical performance analysis that takes into account the entire theatre experience, from production to reception. Beginning with semiotic and cultural materialist theory, Knowles quickly moves into detailed politicized analysis of the ways in which specific aspects of theatrical production, and specific contexts of reception, shape the audience's understanding of what they experience in the theatre. It concludes with five case studies of the cultural work performed by a major Shakespearean repertory theatre, a small nationalist theatre devoted to new play development, a major New York-based avant-garde touring theatre company, a British socialist company dedicated to the work of Shakespeare, and a range of international festivals. This accessible 2004 volume provides a first-step introduction to key terms and areas of performance theory, including reception history, performance analysis, and production analysis.

"Of all Lepage's magic boxes, this is the masterpiece" (Independent on Sunday) Early one August morning in 1945, several kilos of uranium dropped over Japan changed the course of human history. Fifty years later, Hiroshima's vitality is striking: the city where survival itself seemed unimaginable today incarnates the notion of renaissance. Robert Lepage and Ex Machina's The Seven Streams of the River Ota makes Hiroshima a literal and metaphoric site for theatrical journey through the last half-century. In The Seven Streams, Hiroshima is a mirror in which seeming opposites - East and West, tragedy and comedy, male and female, life and death - are revealed as reflections of the same reality.

Robert Lepage has imposed himself in the past three decades as a Wunderkind of contemporary theatre, with eagerly awaited and widely acclaimed productions at the most prestigious theatre festivals and venues around the world. Soon after his international breakthrough with The Dragon’s Trilogy (1984), Lepage’s work became an object of particular scrutiny for critics and scholars, and continues to be subject to media exposure, inspiring cultural critique, academic study and the admiration of audiences across the world. A recurrent fascination with the formal novelty of his theatrical approach imbues most, if not all, critical considerations. However, in spite of the wide interest provoked, little space has been devoted to the quintessential impact of his work on spectatorship, and, most importantly, to connecting the dots between his creative practice and its substantial impact on audiences. Intermediality and Spectatorship in the Theatre Work of Robert Lepage bridges this gap by exploring the notion that intermediality – observed both as a mise-en-scene strategy and a perceptual effect in performance – is situated at the core of the director’s approach. This approach is situated in direct relation to the evolving expectations and medial competencies of spectators, demonstrating an in-depth understanding of the ways in which different media can be engaged in the creative process in a holistic way in order to alter the regime of spectatorship, to enhance its creative and cognitive potential. Lepage’s work and theatre making process are analysed here from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines theatre, media and cultural studies, and which is applied to his solo shows, namely Vinci (1986), Needles and Opium (1991), Elsinore (1995), Far Side of the Moon (2000) and Project Andersen (2005). In bringing to the forefront interconnecting notions of intermediality and contemporary spectatorship, the book highlights the director’s preoccupation with an ongoing dialogue with audiences across the world, and their particular involvement in the development of one of the most innovative practices of the Western theatre landscape.

This book theorizes auteur Robert Lepage’s scenography-based approach to adapting canonical texts. Lepage’s technique is defined here as ‘scenographic dramaturgy’, a process and product that de-privileges dramatic text and relies instead on evocative, visual performance and intercultural collaboration to re-envision extant plays and operas. Following a detailed analysis of Lepage’s adaptive process and its place in the continuum of scenic writing and auteur theatre, this book features four case studies charting the role of Lepage’s scenographic dramaturgy in re-‘writing’ extant texts, including Shakespeare’s Tempest on Huron-Wendat territory, Stravinsky’s Nightingale in a twenty-seven ton pool, and Wagner’s Ring cycle via the infamous, sixteen-million-dollar Metropolitan Opera production. The final case study offers the first interrogation of Lepage’s twenty-first century ‘auto-adaptations’ of his own seminal texts, The Dragons’ Trilogy and Needles & Opium. Though aimed at academic readers, this book will also appeal to practitioners given its focus on performance-making, adaptation and intercultural collaboration.